Anita was born in 1926 in Berlin; the family moved to England in 1939. She had a BA and MA in classics from University of London.  Her MA was on the first book of Maccabees.She then worked in a bookstore, and taught Latin and classics in various highschools  in England.  She moved to Israel in 1963, where she began teaching English in the English department.  She returned to English to be with her ailing mother in 1968 and then enrolled in the PhD program in Linguistics (though it looks like she also considered studying psycholinguistics).  Her PhD is from 1971. Her research interests included the semantics of temporal expressions: aspect, adverbials of duration and frequency, tense; the Davidsonian theory of events, specifically as it affects the interpretation of adverbials and cognate object and of bare infinitivals.